Scientists Discover That Our Nose Knows What's Good For Us Before Our Brains Do

Science knows how taste buds are arranged on the tongue (which, btws, is not in that salty-sweet-bitter-sour way you learned in grade school), how rods and cones line up in our retinas, and even how our nerves sense hunger around our stomach. But the nose, the seat of smell (and therefore a lot of taste), is still mysterious.

A new study, however, has come up with the theory that the actual nerves inside our nostrils that sense smells are not randomly jumbled around, as previously thought, or even organized by basic properties, like “sweet” vs. “sour,” or “smoky” vs. “grassy,” but are physically separated by “good smelling” and “bad smelling.”

As Scientific Americanreports, this news is causing some uproar in the world of smell science. “Morethan just a shake-up,” according to Marion Frank from the University ofConnecticut, “it’s a tornado.”

(We bet you thought she was going to say earthquake! Because of shake-up. Scientists are a surprising bunch, sometimes.)

Here’s why: It’s like if the actual cones and rods in our eyes, instead of sensing light, dark, and color, and letting our brain judge what’s pretty or not, were hard-wired to make judgment calls on what is beautiful and what is ugly. Or, put another way, sensing good smells vs. bad smells is as biologically ingrained as sensing loud sounds vs. soft sounds.

The methods for this raging wind-funnel of research were interesting, as volunteers had a Teflon-coated wire pump very small amounts of certain smelly chemicals onto very small areas inside their noses. Everyone loved the smell of bananas, which was strongest when sensed on one side of the nose, and were unhappy with the smell of garlic, which was strongest on the other, and so on.

This seems to suggest that “smells good” and “smells bad” are as hard-wired into our sensory system as “hot” and “cold,” since the sensory organ itself is organized by that principle. But, as Don Wilson, a skeptical researcher at NYU, points out in the Scientific American article, expectations of smell going in can make a big difference:

“If I take isovaleric acid and tell you it’s going to smell like Parmesan cheese, you’ll smell Parmesan cheese which will most likely be pleasant. But if I tell you it’s going to smell like vomit, you’re going to find it repugnant. It’s the same molecule, but your expectations influence how you perceive it.”

And he has a point! Parmesan does kind of smell like barf. Oh, and smells are still context-dependent, to a certain degree, even if they are fundamentally biological.

It’s hard to say how this could affect cooking in the near future, but we will say that we are looking forward to an enterprising molecular gastronomist including scented Teflon-coated nostril wires on their tasting menu.